14 DAY TRIAL // The URL shortener 'wars' have quieted down lately and everyone was getting accustomed to Bit.ly's unchallenged dominance in the space. With close to 80 percent market share a few months ago and still enjoying its position as the default shortener on twitter.com, the outcome seemed more than clear. These days, things are looking a bit more diversified and with a number of big players like Google and Facebook rolling out their own services, things are getting interesting again.
TweetMeme, a Twitter aggregator which uses the microblogging service to determine which are the most popular links at any point in time, runs a URL shortener stats page which shows the state of the market based on the links that pass through it. The site got a recent overhaul which also affected the stat tracker so TechCrunch set out to see the state of the market at the beginning of 2010.
Unsurprisingly, Bit.ly still enjoys a solid lead, but its market share seems to have vanished in the past couple of months. While it got as much as 80 percent of the market in summer, it now hovers at 55 to 60 percent. This may seem a bit puzzling at first, as there hasn't been anything that would affect the market to such a degree, but it turns out that TweetMeme changed the metric it displays, and now shows absolute market share and includes all the URL shorteners it is aware of, whereas earlier it only showed the top five services and their relative market share. When taking this into account, Bit.ly would still have pretty much the same market share as before.
At the top nothing has changed much, Bit.ly holds over half of the market followed by Tinyurl, the grandfather of the URL shorteners, with about 8 percent and it goes downhill from there. A lot more interesting is what the new players are doing. At number eight, with a solid 1.53 percent is the newly launched Youtu.be shortened URL from YouTube, indicating that sharing online videos is as popular as ever. The Google shortener Goo.gl is at number 15, with 0.78 percent and Facebook's service Fb.me is further down the list at number 19 with 0.47 percent. The stats are based on a 24-hour snapshot of the activity on Twitter, so they may not be always representative and will vary quite a bit from day to day, but they provide enough information to be useful.